Vemon Rudolph bought a secret yeast-raised doughnut recipe from a New Orleans French Chef, rented a building in what is now historic Old Salem in Winston-Salem, NC, and Began selling Krispy Kreme Doughnuts on July 13.1937 to local grocery stores.
The delicious scent of cooking doughnuts drfited into the streets, and passers-by stopped to ask if they could buy hot doughnuts.
So, he cut a hole in an outside wall and started selling hot Original Glazed® Doughnuts directly to customers on the sidewalk.
By now there was a small chain of stores, mostly family-owned. They all used the Krispy Kreme recipe, but each store made its doughnuts from scratch.
For Rudolph and Krispy Kreme, the results were always good but not consistent enough. So Krispy Kreme built a mix plant and developed a distribution system that delivered the perfect dry doughnut mix to each store.
Rudolph and his equipment engineers, then invented and built Krispy Kreme's own doughnut-making equipment. From the 1950s on, they focussed on imporving and automating the doughnut-making process.
During the 1960s, Krispy Kreme enjoyed steady growth throughout the Southeast and began expanding outside its traditional roots.
Vernon Rudolph, our founder, died in 1973 and growth slowed as the company was reorganized for sale to Beatrice Foods Company in 1976.
In 1982, a small group of our early franchisees bought Krispy Kreme back from Beatrice Foods.
A renewed focus on the hot doughnut experience became a priority for the company. Krispy Kreme began to expand outside the Southeast and opened its first store in New York City in 1996. Soon afterward, in 1999, the first store in California opened and national expansion was well underway.
When Krispy Kreme turned 60 years old in 1997, it was officially recognized as a 20th century American icon with the donation of company artifacts to the Smithsonian Instiution's National Museum of American History.
In April 2000, Krispy Kreme held an initial public offering of common stock. It opened the first international store in Canada just outside of Toronto in December 2001. The first stores outside North America opened in Sydney, Australia and in London, England 2003. Since then, Krispy Kreme stores have opened in Asia, Mexico, The Middle East, Puerto Rico and Turkey.
Our International expansion is continuing and in addition, we are working on new tasty products. We are very excited about our future. Stay tuned for more innovative things to come!
